READING REFLECTION #2

LABELING AND DEFINING LITERACY IN 2018

• Why do you think some see literacy as singular and others as plural?

Last week's Lankshear reading cites Gee as "literacies are bound up in social, institutional, and cultural relationships, and can only be understood when they are situated in their social, cultural, and historical contexts." (12) As an educational policy maker charged with creating consistent and readily quantifiable data, a preference for a singular literacy would naturally create only the types of assessments based on expediency and economic viability. Perhaps singular literacy provides an illusion of control when so many new texts are simply flooding the traditional educational space.  Cling to what they know.  Why would they not when data like this from Coiro's Colombia talk affirms the initial lack of correlation between the offline/ online texts.  Now throw the compounding multiplicity of Hartman's six interacting elements into the mix. The path to least resistance is easier to choose.   Literacy in plurality has the potential to be more political (Freire) and perhaps more subjective in the measurement of qualitative data for the tastes of some. I could see how critics may see the intersectionality as a distraction to actual techniques of instruction that deliver quantifiable measurements that in turn could adapt to better instruction. (Sorry if that seems jargony)    To those that see literacy as plural, the various discourses are meaningful to pursue-in particular socio-economic and cultural.  I am curious to know how much the linguistic angle as been confronted as a discourse in understanding how to improve comprehension.  It reminded me of some of George Lakoff's work in how metaphors framed by culture could shape an understanding of reality.  This could be useful especially with our ESL populations but beyond my level of expertise without question. 

• What are some of the things that some people believe are “new” about literacy and would you agree or disagree and why?

What struck me as important from the Afflerbach & Cho study are the distinctions between comprehension of offline and online texts with regards to the cognitive process of overviewing.  Offline texts simply do not have the multitude of distractions and other agendas (commercial interest for example) that on-line texts exhibit.  This study demands more attention to conquer the various obstacles that are inherent in the act of comprehension.  Consider the basketball coach asking the player to be mindful of the angle of their elbow while following through on a free-throw.  This reflection on technique is common in perfecting form in athletics; now we extend the habits of conditioning to the variety of online texts.  Programs and apps exist to curtail this distraction yet this extends only to the habits and discipline of its user to engage the spirit of avoiding the noise.  That the pattern and the sequence of new links map out a new "text" could create more data and patterns to trap how we learn.  Obviously, this could get ethically challenged to the extent that this information becomes a commodity by those collecting the information.  Despite this concern, we can observe yet again the importance of some form of meta-cognition as a pivotal function to the process of comprehension or as Dr. Coiro asked, "How do I make sense of it?'  

• Is there any benefit to talking about these processes as online reading comprehension or digital inquiry, or does it create more confusion?

If we were to reverse engineer the ideal outcome for online reading comprehension, this testimonial for the following student cited in Coiro's speech is clearly the target. In particular what jumped out to me was the self-assessment of the 74% as skill. If there were an example of how a student has imprinted the ideals of "process", that confidence of skill is a clear acknowledgment that this student appreciates the patience and self-reflection land to more clarity in comprehension of on-line texts. This quote reveals that we are not being asked to spin straw into gold. It can be done with a deliberate process. Confusion is inevitable if there is not the slow relinquishment of control towards reciprocal teaching. Leaping from analysis of wiki structures to another digital text without entrenching key elements of reciprocal teaching is a half measure. We are beyond the assumption that the nomenclature of "digital native" or "digital migrant" hold any meaning in a pedagogical sense in that they have inherent critical thinking towards such comprehension. These terms are only meant for their schema as consumers- not learners.

IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING

The purity of its visual communication of a cuttlefish is mesmerizing as its body is the text. The vibrations of colors leave little doubt to the intended audience of the cuttlefish. Be it wiggly air coming into our ears or squiggly lines on a page, we dwell in the world of meaning derived from shared assumptions of interpretation. We know we will never close this gap of pure communication; however, the demands of sharpening these skills has accelerated in ways that should excite us (technology tools and breakthroughs of comprehension and cognition).


I believe the quote from historian Howard Zinn was that you can't be neutral on a moving train. To the extent that online reading is less, equal, or more important, we see where this momentum is taking us as readers. While we may read a traditional text on a digital platform, the plethora of texts in the digital realm in both platform and agenda has exploded the x and y-axis in terms of access and speed to all. The genie is out of the bottle; the toothpaste is out of the tube; the horses have left the barn.
I keep returning to the idea from a week 5 reading about how the manipulation of text has so many benefits. The actual chunking of language in our analysis can move beyond mere color coding in annotations. The purposeful excising of text or the insertion of meta-commentary within the texts are just scratching the surface of what we can do. I plan on using this more deliberately in an upcoming study of syntax and tone within review writing with my AP Language classes.